Nike SB has handed its newest silhouette to four skate shops on four continents and filed the whole thing under a name that was never Nike’s to begin with. Nocturnal in Philadelphia, Instant in Tokyo, Fly Streetwear in Shanghai and Ben-G in Amsterdam are each designing an SB Air Force 1, and the program is being called Color of the Month. The borrowed name is the most interesting thing about it, because the real Color of the Month was invented by shopkeepers in Baltimore, not by anyone in Beaverton.
Here is what the record actually supports, and it is less tidy than the version this post previously carried. The Air Force 1 arrived in late October 1982. Nike’s own history page says that beginning in late 1985 the shoe was sold in limited quantities through a “Shoe of the Month” program at a handful of stores. Complex dates the program to 1984 and adds that Paul Blinken of Cinderella Shoes and Harold Rudo of Charley Rudo Sports flew to Beaverton in 1983, with an initial order of 1,200 pairs. Sotheby’s says the shoe was discontinued in 1984 and calls the program the Color of the Month Club. Nike itself has never said the model was discontinued, and the language in its own 2017 Baltimore campaign was that Nike “wasn’t planning to continue production.”
The one strand that holds across all of it is the name’s origin. Rudo, in his own words: “We started what we called the Color of the Month Club.” The retailers coined it, Nike’s written history used a different phrase, and Nike marketing adopted the retailers’ version later. So a start year should not be asserted, and the earlier claim here that the program launched in 1984 “just two years after the Air Force 1’s debut” rests on one outlet against Nike’s own page. What is safe: three Baltimore stores, Charley Rudo Sports, Cinderella Shoes and Downtown Locker Room, moved thousands of pairs a month in exclusive colors and kept the model commercially alive when Nike’s own plans were pointed elsewhere. Baltimore, specifically, not “East Coast retailers.”
The shoe carrying the program is brand new, which is the other correction this post needs. The Nike SB Air Force 1 is not a long-running skate staple. Nike announced it on March 31, 2026 and the first colorway reached skate shops on April 17, five months ago. Nike calls it a new silhouette built for the board rather than a modified basketball shoe, and the changes are structural: an Air unit in the heel, reduced midsole height for board feel, a modified herringbone tread, a reinforced padded tongue, internal straps with fit pods in the collar lining, a revised toe profile and stitch-turned seams, all on a cupsole. There is no Zoom insole in it, whatever the feeds say.
Ben-G’s pair is the one with the most published detail. It comes in Light Chocolate brown suede with Court Purple on the Swooshes, outsoles and Nike branding, with the shop’s logo on both heels, and carries style code IV5289-200. Ben-G has been on Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal in Amsterdam since 2005, and founder Benny Komala has explained that the shop’s dog logo traces the outline of the dog from the Benji films. The other three are further out. Instant, in Kichijoji rather than the Shibuya several outlets have printed, takes IV5289-002 in black suede with Game Royal and white. Fly Streetwear, founded in Shanghai in 1999 by Jeff Han, has IV5289-001 in Photon Dust suede and University Gold. Nocturnal, opened in Philadelphia in 2000 by pro skater Kerry Getz, is listed at IV6099-003 in Cool Grey, Court Green and black, after earlier reports carried IV5289-003. All four shops have prior Nike SB Dunk collaborations behind them.
Pricing and dates are where this program is still soft, and the previous version of this post hardened every hedge in the source reporting into a flat statement. The $120 figure is expected rather than announced, and no euro price has been published. The Ben-G release has been reported three different ways, October 2026, Holiday 2026 and Spring 2027, sometimes inside a single article. Treat the window as unconfirmed. The European exclusivity is also reported as likely rather than confirmed, and coverage of the Instant pair lists Nike.com among its channels, which is not what a region lock looks like.
Worth saying plainly: four shop collaborations landing across roughly October 2026 to Spring 2027 is not a color of the month, and Nike SB has not run a regionally assigned program in this shape before. The single-shoe view of the Ben-G pair is covered separately in our Ben-G Light Chocolate post. More on the silhouette is in the Air Force 1 hub, with the rest of the program filed under Nike SB and the Nike archive.
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Source: Justfreshkicks
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